I suppose you could decrypt your retail PS3's HDD, fiddle with the SFO, put it back - but its pretty much pointless - there is nothing to accomplish by doing it.

Pointless ? No, not necessarily. If developers could have access to save games... Maybe a buffer overflow in a certain game could result in running unsigned code. Remember GTA: LCS or Lumines on the PSP ? Gripshift ?

Originally Posted by Mathieulh

2. Since 2.80 there is a nice new protection added called DRMDIR, basically they add a directory under the titleid folder (on the hdd) called DRMDIR which contains hashes of the PARAM.SFO and EBOOT.BIN files) This folder is created upon package install and will of course prevent you from replacing the PARAM.SFO (which is too bad since the database issue could have been bypassed after rebuilding it)

Well, we could use that Infectus something-something to go back to 2.70 or similar and replace .sfo files at will !

Originally Posted by Mathieulh

UPDATE: For those who wonder why not just replace the DRMDIR folder, its content is not viewable under user/game priviledges, also the hashes stored there are not the standard md5 or sha1 you are used to see but based on a hmac algorithm.

Could it be viewable with kernel privileges ? Once we do something with those modified .sfo files, of course.

Originally Posted by Mathieulh

Anyway this idea is stupid and wont work. (not to mention you would need to go through the hassle of decrypting, encrypting your hdd (which would take hours for each step) etc etc each time you want to change your game. Not worth the trouble, you are better off purchasing your games than doing this.

Not if you buy an external HDD (which are pretty cheap now). You could transfer the backups to the internal HDD and let the PS3 encrypt the data on the fly. But my best bet would be a "redirection" of the BluRay drive to an SSD (1ms access time). Even tho their a bit pricey, they will probably provide much much better loading speeds than the BR drive. Again, kinda like the PSP with the UMD format. Games would load faster and perform better.